


Heartwood

by paperiuni



Series: Shades of Red and Green [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Vignette, bittersweet fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-17 11:23:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5867410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bull tends to Dorian after an injury, and a buried memory comes to light.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heartwood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JustJasper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustJasper/gifts).



> Written for Jasper, who is a joy and a delight, on the day of her birth. Many happy returns!

When Bull sneaks back into the bedroom, tea and soup acquired, Dorian is tossing and turning under the heaped blankets. His murmuring voice wavers from a snatch of Common into raspy Tevene. His right hand with its splinted fingers is not visible on the covers. Bull sets aside the tray and leans over him: rolling on top of healing bones makes for a nasty way to wake up.

Dorian's sleep-warm but not feverish--a good thing, because the healer is occupied by the leg wound Cassandra took in their morning scuffle with the red templar lieutenant. Gently, Bull starts unwinding the blanket bundled around Dorian's hurt hand.

"Easy there," he says, in an undertone. "Hold on, I've got..."

Dorian twists, seizing at Bull with his left hand. Reflexively he balks away, leaving Dorian to snatch at a fistful of air. His eyes snap open, pupils so wide that the iris is a thin rim of green around the black. "You move, and we all die!"

"Dorian." Bull leans back in with more caution. "Dorian, you're safe. Wake up. C'mon." Poor bastard. He's already moony with the elfroot, and now some old nightmare is creeping into the mix.

Dorian's fingers unfold slow and hesitant. He blinks, adjusting to the light of the candles, then inhales in rough surprise. "Bull?"

"Yeah, right here."

"No." Bracing on the heel of his injured hand, Dorian fumbles up. Bull grimaces, but the agitation bursting through Dorian's bleariness holds him back. "No, you can't be here. You died--Maker, you died for us, and I--"

"Hey," Bull says, and risks a jolt of lightning from Dorian's good hand to cup his palms on his cheeks. Usually Bull wouldn't do that outside of sex--Dorian would eel away, or scoff his vexation. A sheen of sweat clings to his skin, and his scalp is damp under the tangled hair. "Nobody's dead. Not even the Seeker, and she broke her leg in two places. We ambushed that red templar, remember? Good fight, too."

Just say anything normal. How much of this is the elfroot, and how much the dream?

"Red lyrium." Dorian breathes, ragged. He stays docilely in Bull's hold, though. "It was... everywhere. In the cells, in the stones of the castle. I kept thinking I'd be sick."

"Mm-hm." That sounds familiar: whenever they come across red lyrium growths, or even the corrupted templars, the mages are the first to feel its nauseating effects.

"And you." Dorian's finger traces the outer contour of his eye socket. "The entire year, down there. How did you--"

Oh. Finally the pieces fall. Redcliffe Castle. Dorian and the Inquisitor's jaunt into the future. Bull remembers the Inquisitor being closemouthed about it, beside the details they needed to arm themselves against Corypheus. He'd kind of shunted it into the pile of _magical shit that makes your brain hurt_ and accepted that, fine, the cocky 'Vint had untwisted the knot his mad mentor had made in time.

That'd been before the preening Tevinter turned into _Dorian_ in his thoughts.

"You know where you are now?" He steers around the aborted question. "Right now, here."

Dorian frowns. "Is that pertinent?" That, blessedly, is the most Dorian-ish thing he's said since he woke.

"Yeah. Answer the question. Please."

"We went to the villa in the forest. In the Emerald Graves. This is... Gracevine Outpost, no?"

"Got it in one." Bull smiles lop-sided in approval.

As Dorian rubs at his eyes, Bull lets his own hands fall. He's toeing a line there, even on a good day, and the elfroot draught and the evident confusion are not helping Dorian's equilibrium.

"I seem to recall an unpleasant impact of my knuckles on the villa steps."

"A behemoth tossed you," Bull supplies. "You fell on your hand. Three broken fingers, and a lot of bruises down your side." Keep talking. The particulars don't matter, but retracing the day seems to ground Dorian.

"Lovely. Did I sleep long? Aside from the fact that something seems to have died in my mouth, I'm rather famished."

"No wonder. You dropped off from the elfroot tea like a stone." Bull's glad of that. Though Dorian's had worse, he walked all the way back on his own feet, with the bruising.

Bull moves the small table next to the bed, so Dorian won't have to get too far up. It beats pointing the conversation back to the panicked undertone of Dorian's voice when he woke, or his memories of the future that never was.

Never was, from where Bull is standing. Yet, somehow, Dorian and the Inquisitor found Leliana there, unbroken under torture, and Grand Enchanter Fiona, and Sera and Bull himself.

Easier to pour the tea for Dorian and make sympathetic noises when he gripes that it tastes like grass swimming in honey.

"Cut them a break. They finished the palisade last week. Fucking marvel that they had a bed for you, and not just a pallet in the stable loft."

"I'd have set the palisade on fire." The spoon is ungainly in Dorian's left hand, but sustenance clearly trumps grace right now.

"Wanton destruction of Inquisition property?"

Dorian hums around a mouthful of potato and river fish. Some colour returns to his cheeks, clear even in the candlelight. Some brighter news to report to the Inquisitor, who unashamedly haunts Cassandra's bedside, and to Varric, who pretends no interest in the proceedings but whom Bull caught sitting at the foot of the Seeker's cot, reading quietly from his notebook.

That is the trouble with finding good company. You grow to want to keep it.

"Thank you." Dorian sets the empty bowl back on the tray. "I... trust you have other business besides tending to me, so I should turn in again. Not that I've left the bed."

"You sure?" He should thwart the sharp tips of Dorian's words with a suitable crack in return. "No entertainment needed?"

"I'm not quite up to our usual sort of diversions, I'm afraid," Dorian says with some asperity. His eyelashes flicker, fine patterns of shadow under his eyes.

"I might be good for a couple of other things," Bull says, and _fuck_ , here's a moment where you feel the brunt of your words only when they've been spoken. Why didn't he take Dorian's thanks and go?

A heartbeat. Dorian shifts on the bed to the right of the table, so he can lower the toes of one foot to the rough-hewn floor planks.

"Bull." His eyes are hazy and dark with the vestiges of the elfroot. He manages an imperious curl to his whisper. "Let me see you."

With a small, skeptical hum, Bull obliges him. His knee will complain of a crouch after the day he's already had, so he sets his knees to the floor. Odd, to linger so close to Dorian with no immediate purpose.

Dorian's finger trembles with the delicacy of the contact when he touches the corner of Bull's right eye. "It was red. Not grey. Flecks of red in the pupil, like gold flakes in ink."

Bull blinks slow under Dorian's examination. His confession. Whatever this is.

"And the veins," Dorian continues, "as if someone had stitched red thread into the skin. Dagna says that the corruption moves in the blood. She must be right." He bites his lips so his mouth thins into a slanted line. His fingertip tracks Bull's cheekbone to his ear, then the shape of his jaw.

"You stopped it." It feels like a presumption to put his hand on Dorian's knee, but Dorian doesn't shy away. "So, in the end, that never happened."

"That is _not_ true," Dorian snaps with a kind of desperation that brings Bull short. "You know, that's what I said to Leliana. After she broke the neck of her torturer. 'Aren't you curious how we got here?' " His fingers dig into Bull's shoulder. "She lived it. You--you all lived it. And then you died for us. I saw a demon throw your body into the hall, and I hardly knew who you had been."

This is why you don't ask. The Ben-Hassrath taught Bull that a mind is malleable as clay, breakable as a fired jar. What he learned on Seheron were the depths of its resilience, how a person could walk on through horror after horror and, after it all, laugh at a joke and split a fruit with a friend and offer to stand an extra watch when someone needed sleep.

The cracks are always there. Sometimes life mortars them whole again, for months or years, before the lines shift and splinter.

"Well," Bull says, hushed. "You got the chance to learn."

" _Vishante kaffas_ , I did. To my benefit or detriment, I don't always know." Dorian's smile twists, but it's there.

"That's fucking typical." Bull strokes a thumb across the edge of that smile. "Leave me hanging, will you?"

Dorian sniffs, fidgeting his foot against the side of Bull's leg. "All right, you meddlesome man. If I must."

"Nobody's making you." For the sake of the argument, Bull should probably ignore the lump in his throat.

"How did we get from my misadventures in time to the worthiness of your company?"

"Because the latter is more fun?" He'll take Dorian's precarious smile and twitchy gestures over the brittle horror raised by his Redcliffe memories.

"I suppose the fact is," Dorian says, "that it made for the first thing I knew about you. You'd been alone, in pain, on the brink of madness, and you never stopped fighting." He exhales. "This is rather far from my definition of fun."

"Sorry." Dorian would be far from the first person spilling their proverbial guts to Bull. It can be necessary; it is never pretty. He regrets it a little.

"Don't apologise." A firm shake of his head, for all that Dorian seems soft around his edges. "But, there it is."

The Ben-Hassrath's metaphor is wrong, Bull finds himself thinking. A mind is--is living wood that branches into new shapes, opens new leaves, breaks and blooms again. A lightning-split tree may still put out new limbs in the spring. He should put that in his next report. When he gets around to it.

Not entirely steady, he cups the side of Dorian's face; Dorian leans in, not suffering the touch but seeking it.

"I am a tad curious," Dorian says, "as to what other things you are good for."

"Dancing," Bull offers. "Casual astronomy. I could tell you the five stages of armouring the antaam from 'contemplation of the peace' to 'we have reports of Koslun's glorious return', but it'd involve a lot of Qunlat."

Bending forward, Dorian smothers a full-throated laugh against Bull's shoulder. "Perhaps we can come to an agreement."

Bull answers the laughter, lower and rougher, but the answer to Dorian's unspoken request is in the set of his hand on Dorian's hair, heavy and sure. _Stay. Stay. Stay._

Of course he will.

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt for this one was Dorian's memories of Redcliffe Castle and the ensuing fear of losing Bull. I may have gone a little tangential to the prompt. ♥


End file.
